Low hanging fruit

Low hanging fruit

In America there is currently a “war on drugs” with the main place of focusing on these drugs is in low-income communities. Police are often pushed to target the “low hanging fruit”. What I mean by this is that police are awarded for getting more arrest and to get these arrest they tend to go to the bad neighborhoods, which are normally low-income black communities, to get “petty” arrests instead of targeting the big people who are the distributors they aim for the buyers and users. This is also due to the fact that police are required to get a certain amount of tickets and arrest in a month. This has a big impact on the black community whether you know it or not.  I recently learned of a city having a required to increase arrest and tickets to bring in money for the city. Which even more affects low-income communities.

            The effects of this starts with small charges and then in the long run these charges can prevent you from excelling and going farther in life. Some of these charges can keep you from getting into good schools and even from getting good well-paying jobs. This can affect the type of activities you get into, if you can’t get any good jobs then you may resort to other activities to get money. Which can lead to more interactions with the law. This targeting can also be one of the factors of keeping black people suppressed and preventing social mobility and growth in the black communities. Which then also affects the families of the individual who is affected by this targeting.

            Another possible effect of this is after being arrested you could be labeled a certain way which can change the way you are looked at by people and their community. There was an experiment to show how people act after being labeled a specific way. It showed that once labeled as a criminal the person would want to do bad and then start to hang out with different types of people such as criminal, that they normally would not want to be around even if that is not your normal character. People can begin to change this by trying to appeal laws and requirements that cause these things, or make it so that all your arrest can’t be in one area which would then force officers to go after other people in different communities.

Talking white and Colorblindness

Talking white and Colorblindness

Growing up as an African American male I was often told that I talk white why is this. Why is it that I cannot just be talking correctly? This idea that white people are meant to talk a way and black people are not meant to talk this way or black people aren’t meant to talk correctly is due to stereotypes developed early when America was being created and these thoughts about people that are different continues to stay around. This helps me understand why the default or the best thing is always something after white. And things that are bad are black and things that are white are pure. An Example of this is how white cakes in the stores are called Angel’s food cake but some chocolate cakes are called devil’s food cake. This brings up the topic of color blindness as well. The idea of your white friends saying “I don’t see you as black” being a good thing.

            These stereotypes are built into the thoughts and teachings everyone is taught in America. A study was done with police officers of all ethnicities with a pop-up gun range where you had to shoot the “bad guy” and this test shows that not only did the white officers shoot black males more often but this showed that all the people were more likely to shoot a black person more. This is due to what we learn about people. We are taught things knowingly and unknowingly about cultures and skin colors in American society. This process is started when we are all children and how we began going to school and then we are immediately treated differently. A study was done that shows teachers unknowingly focuses more on the things students of color do wrong than the white students who do the same things in the classroom.

            Colorblindness is not ok for this fact as well. Some colleges are beginning to use a somewhat color blind selection methods. This is terrible because of the fact white people are going to be the ones who go to the best private schools and have the best opportunities to make their college resumes and applications look better. While on the other side if color and knowledge of where you come from are considered it helps college admissions people to understand the backgrounds of each student and why it is that they have better opportunities.

https://search.proquest.com/docview/1771392187/1220F3419E7945BCPQ/3?accountid=13503

Privilege

Privilege

            Let’s all take a minute to acknowledge our privilege as Rhodes College students. Privilege is something a lot of people at this school were born with and don’t even know or want to think about they have. Some people don’t like to acknowledge their privileges because then it shows them they were born with an advantage that lots of people were not born with. 

            I would like to take a moment to focus on white privilege alone because this is not something earned or worked for, it is simply given to you based on the color of your skin alone. This goes back to the roots of the American culture and how Americans came with a way to judge a person from somewhere they have never gone and has been this way even before slavery. The significance of simply being born white gives white people a big leg up over African American people. A study was done to see if employers, who were looking for candidates for specific jobs, decisions were affected by skin color. It showed that if a white man with a felony that has the same credentials as a black man who has not been to prison, the white man with a felony was more likely to get the job. Later they asked the employers where they knew of this discrimination. They said no they just thought that the white people would be more suitable for the job at hand. White privilege is embedded deep in the way we function as a society. Slavery did help to enhance these thoughts and feelings of white dominance over black people as white people were able to do pretty much anything they wanted to black people because they were looked at as property and as people.  

            This unknown or not talked about but yet very prevalent privilege that white people have continues to have and to pass down for generations while black people have to work to have privileges for their future kids which is hard to do because of social mobility which is the ability to move up in social classes, and since black people were lower on the social class scale then white people due to slavery and laws that kept black people suppressed for years.

            But now, all of us as Rhodes College students have some privilege that people at some state schools will never have due to the connections this college has and the prestigious name that it carries on our degree when we all graduate.